So What If You Are A Brand New Business, You Need To Think About Your Reputation

By admin

December 12, 2007

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I really enjoy teaching people/clients about everything they can do to help them with their brand awareness and management, but there is something that does frustrate me. A majority of the time when I am working with a brand new (online) business owner, and I start to talk to them about the not-so traditional ways of marketing like Social Media to help them with their reputation management, they do not take me as serious as they need to be.

I want this to be the warning for every new to Internet business owner who is reading this post!

The reason a majority of the major businesses online have a reputation management problem is because they did nothing to combat it from the start. Lets face it, the bigger and bigger you get, the more people you are going to have that want to bring you down. It happens, and I don’t care if you are the “happiest place on earth” (like Disneyland) you will never be able to please 100% of the people 100% of the time. There will be problems, and you have to be prepared.

These new-to-Internet business owners tell me that they do not need to worry about their brand right now, because it does not make a difference and nobody knows them (or about their brand) anyway. Are they planning on failing, before they even get started? This kind of thinking could not be more wrong!

I can name a handful of companies off the top of my head like Wal-mart & Coca Cola who probably wish they had controlled their online reputation when they VERY FIRST went live online (if you visit the Google search results you can probably figure out why).

You may not be big now, and there may be no one searching for you at present, but aren’t you planning on it? If you control the first several pages of search results for your brand now, while no one knows about you, it is much easier and cheaper (to do so) then when you get big. I mean ALOT cheaper, (if it can even be done). There are some companies (that I know of) spending up to 10K a month just to help push down negative results.

Why not take care of this problem now, while you are smaller and the cost is a lot less?

Think about this – what if you are a company that dropships products, and you have 1000 satisfied customers, and you have one customer that did not get his/order on the delivery date you stated on your website. After investigation, you find out if was the postal (or shipping) company who was at fault, but yet the customer writes a negative review about you (before you even get a chance to make things right on a problem that you could not control), and your brand. Is this fair? It is not fair if that article ranks in the top 10 of the search results when people type in your brand name when you have had 1000 other happy customers. Think of how much business a negative result could cost you. However; It is your fault though, if it does rank because you did not do anything about it when you first created your business, and didn’t give a second thought to brand/reputation management.

If you can control the SERPs right now when you are new, and much smaller, this will not even be an issue years down the road because you have established your brand (for years now) and people only see the stuff you want them to. It will be really hard for a negative article to creep into the top 10 search results with all the content and pages that you have been establishing for the last several years.

Here are my suggestions -

1. Domain Names – Go and buy all the domain names that you can with your brand name in it. (of course all of the usual like .net .biz .org etc) but you can even be creative and use your name other ways too. Then write unique content for each one of the domains, and provide product information, product testimonials, maybe even some news feeds from related sources, or other related product review sites. Just do your best to establish these sites with good content, link building and Social Media as much as you would with your main domain.

2. Press – Pay someone who is a professional to write some amazing press about your business, have a contest, or launch a specialty line (something newsworthy) and submit it the proper sources like PR Leap (who allow anchor text links), Marketwire or oldie (but goodies) like PR Web. The most important thing you can do with press (for reputation management), is make sure you use the brand name you want to be found for (when people search out your name or brand) in the title of the press.

3. Create Social Media Profiles – You want to look for three things in a social media profile – Number One – Do they allow you to have a static URL (ie – www.squidoo.com/BRAND-NAME-HERE), Number Two - do they allow you to space for content, and Number Three – do they allow you to create links inside the content, and do those links pass any juice? You need to make sure you treat your profiles pages like you do (or should) the content of a website by mixing up the content and rotating the anchor text links you create. Specifically for reputation management purposes, these sites that allow profiles (or static URLs) do well:

Now there are many other methods that I use (and that can be used) for reputation management, but using all three of these methods mentioned above can really help establish your site for some time to come (especially if you keep it up, and don’t stop working on it). Controlling your reputation and brand this way is also going to cost you a lot less, then trying to clean up something negative after the fact.

I wrote this post to answer the question of those wondering why they need to worry about their brand, and reputation when they are brand new to online business, and I hope this helps clarify, even a little!

Written by admin on December 12, 2007

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Comments

http://www.holdemreview.com Nick

Great article Mat. I was hoping you could expand a bit on point #1 (domain names). What type of content are you talking about and what is the main goal for these domains? Are you talking about having them rank for your company name in the SERPs?

Thanks,
Nick

Mat Siltala

Nick,

I am glad you liked the article -

The main point of these domains is to help you dominate for your brand, or name so when your brand or name is typed in the search engines – you control all of the results. If you are wanting to control the type of stuff being said about you, this is the best way to do it.

You can have product reviews, testimonials, articles, feeds to related blogs, and links to your social networks (other ways the user can connect with you and your business) It is a great way of getting your brand out there, and giving the impression that you are “all over” the web.

http://mollermarketing.com Nate Moller

This is a great point. When I talk to clients about SMO and Brand Management, I feel like the only ones who really take me serious are the ones who end up being really successful with their online businesses. Not only does it help them protect their name and reputation, but it’s also a link builder and networking practice that can end up paying big for them. I just got this email from a client who has be “SMOing” and networking (while at the same time protecting her business for the future):

Would a joint Venture with, say, a fabric designer be a good one? Example, what if my favorite fabric designer asked if I would do commission work for her site? Since she is an artist, not a seamstress, she is interested in my abilities. I think I just hit gold on this one! Still working on details now! Oh, and she actually bought 2 pair of pillowcases I made out of her fabric! YOU’RE THE MAN!!!! – Cassie

The coolest thing is she is implementing the social side of things and getting connections like this. Thanks for the great step by steps on protecting new-to-Internet businesses.

http://www.97thfloor.com Chris Bennett

Great work Mat,

With reputation management the best offense is by far the best defense.

http://sexyseo.blogspot.com SexySEO

@NKMedia 100% agree with you and as I know from my experience it is an ordinary situation within corporate business and business structures

Mat Siltala

Jason,

Normally I would 301 the extra domains (.nets, .biz etc) to the main site, but this was just a suggestion (one of many different ways if you needed) to help you build additional sites (with your brand name in them) that could fill up the SERPs when people type in your name. If you 301 all of the domains you will only get one result in the search engine (the main URL) but what I suggested can help you dominate for your brand with your content.

Again, I am not saying you have to do this every time, it is just a suggestion (or one strategy) if you feel you are going to need it.

But I would agree that in most cases you will just do the normal 301s to those extra domains. As far as preventing someone from hi-jacking your name through these other domains – YES, you do that so nobody buys those domains from under you and creates negative or competing content with the risk of customers thinking its you! (that is just good reputation management too) I hope this clears up what I was suggesting in my post!